Focus put up an excellent piece and I'd recommend a read. It's covering a 137-page document which is the political platform for the German Green Party for 2021's election.
The four things to take out of this:
1. On pensions, the Greens want to make your pension situation a minimum of 48-percent of your regular salary. I should note here....if you go back....20 to 30 years, it used to be near 60-percent....but has been on the decline for years. How they'd cover you, if your donation to the pension fund did achieve 'success'? Not a lot of talk over this, and it'd have to come out of regular tax revenue (if you ask me).
2. If you live in highly rural areas of Germany with marginal health care? Well....they have this idea of 'health centers'. I looked over the details, and just wondering....to make this work, you need a fair amount of money, but there is no detail to the cost factor and where the money will come from.
3. A 35-hour work-week for nurses. I looked at the basic comment, and then wondered....if you have a national nurse shortage, and suggest that each nurse would work 10 to 12 percent less....your shortage of nurses would expand out by 10 percent minimum.
4. Finally, there would be this 'slush' fund (50 billion Euro), which would be thrown at expanding internet, more research into IT/biotechnology, climate-neutral infrastructures, innovation with railways, more car/truck charging stations, and more 'modern' urban development.
Some of these will appeal to younger voters, and to certain groups of voters (like the nurses). It wouldn't surprise me if the Greens went and took a quarter of all SPD-voters.
As for delivering the 'promises'? Well....you have to form a coalition, and the bulk of these 'promises' will be tossed out, with only a couple of these in the final package.
2 comments:
On point three there's more to the story. When you drop work hours for that sort of occupation illness and absent days decrease by up to 80% in some studies.
So in effect your not creating the shortage that you think, it's actually working the problem from the other angle.
German nurses claim (even the ones who've left the country and gone to Canada or Australia) that there's a tremendous amount of stress upon them (partly the fault of the doctors) and partly due to rotating shifts. Some suggest that they'd put up with the stress....if the pay-level was 'fair', but that's one of the three big grumbles about the system.
I had a German nurse chat about this two years ago via the blog, and why she eventually re-settled in Australia...completely content since moving over respect and pay-level now.
There is a serious problem in nurse recruitment in Germany, but it seems the current program is to find more Asian and Mexican nurses who speak German, and ship them in....to make up for the German nurses leaving.
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